Thursday, April 12, 2018

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, by Theodora Goss

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club, #1)The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


If you're going to do a Victorian mashup novel in 2018, after so so many of them have been done, it needs some kind of special sauce to make it stand out. This book was fine, but the special sauce was supposed to be the interjections. Those would have been good if they hadn't ended up being trivial--either semi-spoilers or absolutely pure character development without moving the plot. It read OK, and some reviewers really seem to like it, but I don't know for whom it would really hit the mark--maybe YA readers who have seen kids' versions of the original stories as movies. The Athena Club has lots of adventures and there's lots of girl power, but it's a pretty light snack of a book. All the characters have potential, though, so possibly future books that maybe focus on one character more will be better? I don't know.

For a more interesting kind of interjection, try Ship of Theseus by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. Not sure how that one would work on a Kindle though.



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